MusicLM works incredibly well, but I quickly ran out of ideas to prompt the model. The future of AI is Chimeric AI. Let’s use the models together. Here’s a prompt template to help you generate text prompts for MusicLM.

Let’s take a closer look at this GPT-4 prompt to better understand why it works the way it does.

• Write an English-only prompt to generate music. – This grounds the model to output a text prompt using English that is used to be the input into a generative AI model for music generation.
• The music is lo-fi, mostly played in the background while I am writing. – This part of the prompt is used to describe the music that I want MusicLM to generate. Replace with your music. Experiment with how detailed you want to be.
• Generate a complete track 20 seconds in length. – The MusicLM model currently produces 20 seconds of music. I found that telling the model to generate 20 seconds in length makes the track make sense versus being cut off.
• Limit to 100 tokens for the prompt. – This limits the output of GPT- to 100 words (ish). If you do not set a limit, ChatGPT will write a very long prompt.

Tell us what you are exploring in the Discord server.

The Lofi Girl Shadowbox is backlit with the latest color of CheerLights. It’s always changing based on what people set the color to on Twitter and Discord.

Parts

• Lofi Girl poster – I am a 1 A.M person
• Shadowbox
• Black foam board
• Foam block
• Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W (based on the Raspberry Pi Pico W)
• LED string lights
• Micro USB cord and power supply
• Other things: utility knife, straightedge, hot glue gun, and repositionable glue squares

Assembly

The poster that I got from the Lofi Girl shop was 30cm x 45cm and on really thin paper. I used the repositionable glue squares to stick the poster on the black foam board. This gives the poster some structure. I cut a hole in the back of the shadowbox and feed the USB cable through. I cut out a rough shape of the Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W and wrapped the string lights around the foam block.

Programming

The best part of the whole project is that CheerLights is baked into the Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W. All you need to do is program the device with your Wi-Fi settings. Open Thonny and open the WIFI_CONFIG.py file. Change SSID to your wireless network name, PSK to your password, and COUNTRY to your country code like US or GB. Click Save.

Pimoroni has an excellent tutorial on getting Thonny installed and an explanation of the Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W kit. I have also written a tutorial on the CheerLights blog.

Chill

Now that you’ve done all of the hard work, it’s time to chill and enjoy the Lo-Fi vibes tuned to CheerLights. While I was making this project today, I had Lofi Girl on YouTube, and the lights were just bright enough to see what I was doing without cutting myself. I am looking for a wall to permanently install my Lofi Girl Shadowbox. I am seriously thinking of drilling a hole in the wall to hide the USB power adapter.